Though it should mean without bears,
bearless means barren. The opposites
of word, according to thesaurus.com,
question, silence, breach, break, quiet.
Quixotic comes from Don Quixote,
a book I have not read. First known
concordance to the Hebrew Bible completed
1448: took a decade to compile. Jean-Baptiste
Point du Sable first permanent settler
of Chicago: came from Africa and Hispaniola: I
am obsessed with his name, those vowels and
diphthongs. Point du Sable means Sand Point.
He married Kitihawa, Potawatomi woman
Christianized to Catherine. English shows
its seams, seems made of them. Once I misread
the line a distant but reachable star as a distant
but reachable scar. Porousness of English moves me,
despite its brazen thefts and leaking grammars. These
marks of rupture seem
not scar but revelation.
Annie Diamond is an Ashkenazi Jewish poet and recovering academic living in Chicago. She has been awarded fellowships by MacDowell, Luminarts Cultural Foundation, The Lighthouse Works, and Boston University, where she earned her MFA in 2017. Her poems are forthcoming in Midwest Review and appear in Western Humanities Review, No Tokens Journal, Pornstar Martini Magazine, and elsewhere.